Local Wine Merchant Passes: Remembering Frank Crandall

Frank Crandall may well have been one of those lucky people
who lived two unique incarnations to their fullest.

Renegade Wines

For more than two decades, he was the go-to guy for many
Santa Barbara wine aficionados. As
founder and owner of Renegade Wines, he garnered a following for his expansive
selection of fairly priced bottles, his large wine storage space and a knack
for tracking down hard-to-find labels.
But a younger Crandall lived a completely different reality – a young
man’s rock and roll dream.

“You know, his brother in law was Alice Cooper,” says Jim
Fiolek, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Vintners Association and
longtime friend of Crandall. This
fascinating fact – that Crandall’s longtime wife, Nickie, was the sister of a
rock legend – wasn’t something a decidedly unassuming and humble Crandall would
readily mention. But his affiliation,
with both Alice Cooper and the world of rock and roll, extended well beyond
family ties.

Crandall taught himself to play electric guitar and bass a
young teen. Many a prepubescent’s dream,
but Crandall had a special knack. In the
1970s, he helped found a classic rock band, Jett Black, that would soon become
familiar with the roaring of crowd-swarmed stadiums by touring the East Coast
and opening for hot names like Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen. When he moved to Southern California, his skill
with strings got him headlining gigs on the wildly popular Sunset Strip and
with accomplished performers like Tony Childs and The Motels. And it was sheer talent that garnered him
songwriting awards alongside colleague Alice Cooper; the domestic connection
simply made the accolades sweeter.

It is quintessential irony that such an accomplished strummer
would be afflicted with arthritis.
Crandall’s was, in fact, especially severe, and it affected both his
hands and feet. Those who met him in his
later years undoubtedly noticed a visibly crippled hand whenever they went to
shake it. But Crandall always extended
it without hesitation, and always with a distinctive, infectious guffaw.

Necessity forced Crandall to look at a different career track. “His arthritis is why he gave up the bass,”
recalls Fiolek. But the wine business
proved more than mere employment; it became a veritable way of life for
Crandall. His new incarnation started at
the wine department inside Jurgensen’s, a now-closed but once-popular grocery
along Coast Village Road in Montecito.
“People would come by asking for rare wines and Frank would put together
these fabulous cases for them,” remembers Antonio Gardella, a fine wine
specialist with wine distributor Henry Wine Group, and Crandall’s longtime
supplier and friend. “Over the years, he
had this Rolodex of all these people and their wine wants, and when Jurgensen’s
closed, he took it with him.”

Briefly, he sold wine while he worked at the Wine Bistro,
another Coast Village Road landmark of yesteryear. But, as friend and Renegade business partner
Steve Wayne tells it, “he soon said to himself, ‘Hey, I could do this on my
own.’” His solo venture launched in 1990
from a wine warehouse near Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone run by then-wine merchant
and successful winemaker Chris Whitcraft.
But it wasn’t long before he found a quirky spot at East Gutierrez and
Santa Barbara Streets to open a wine shop that would be his own.

“The Wine Cask had just opened so a lot of people called him
nuts for going off on his own,” recounts Wayne.
“They called him a renegade.” The
name fit, and stuck.

Renegade Wines opened in a 1500-square foot, no-frills
storage space in an industrial complex.
Not a splashy spot, and not easy to find. “The speakeasy of wine shops” is how one
tourist recently described it after finally finding his way there, Wayne recalls
with a laugh. Indeed, committed wine
buffs have made their way there over the years, enough so that Crandall
expanded his shop twice – once around 1995 and again about six years ago – by
knocking down the walls to neighbor spaces that became vacant. He built his business by engaging customers
with genuine enthusiasm for wine and making a point to keep prices competitive. And he forged solid, long-lasting
relationships with purveyors like Gardella, who still recalls the largest order
Crandall ever placed with him: “25 cases of Dow’s Port,” he says.

Crandall also developed a keen palate for tasting wine. “We’d have distributors come in with samples
and Frank would take on sip and say, ‘Corked!’” recalls Wayne. “And after two or three more sips, you’d
realize, yeah, he’s right, this wine is corked.
And the distributor would tell us he’d been tasting other buyers on the
same bottle all day and they’d loved it!”
Crandall preferred whites, chardonnays in particular, and especially
those from the Corton-Charlemagne appellation in Burgundy. “On special occasions, the bottle he’d open
all the time was the Louie Latour,” remembers Wayne.

Today, Renegade Wines is a nearly 5000-square foot shop with
a burgeoning selection that Crandall regularly updated for his customers
online, at www.renegadewines.com. Most of the space is, actually, home to
temperature- and humidity-controlled lockers for wine storage that are under
24-hour video surveillance. Budding
collectors have smaller eight-case lockers to rent; serious connoisseurs can
choose spaces that hold close to 600 cases.
The store’s total storage capacity is more than a quarter-million
bottles. Renegade obtained a license to
hold monthly tastings four years ago, which has also helped bolster business.

When Crandall passed away on December 29th, it
came as a surprise, a shock even, for many who knew him. “I had no idea he was that sick,” says
Fiolek. Par for the course, perhaps, for
a man who wore humility on his sleeve.
Wayne says the 64-year-old ended his daily visits to the wine shop in
May of last year, a victim to health complications wrought by cancer. But his spunk managed to survive. “He was still cracking jokes last time I
spoke with him on the phone,” says Wayne, “about three or four days before he
died.”

Wayne worked with Crandall at Renegade Wines for 10
years. He is hoping to buy Renegade
Wines outright. For now, he says the
store is still very much open for business.

For Fiolek, the few days since Crandall’s passing have
spurred memories of both wine and rock and roll. Turns out, the man who successfully lived two
incarnations found a way to perfectly, wonderfully – but briefly – enjoy the
two together. The launch of Renegade
Wines in 1990 coincided with the formation of a band of Santa Barbara-based
winemakers and wine aficionados called “H2S”; the formula for hydrogen sulfide
was a tongue-and-cheek title equating the chemical compound’s notoriously
stinky rotten-egg smell to the purported talents of the band members, which
included Fiolek and Whitcraft, among others.
“Our first gig was [winemaker] Fred Brander’s 40th birthday
party in October of 1990,” remembers Fiolek.
Crandall was the rock band’s bassist for about three years, until the
debilitating pain from arthritis won out.

“But Frank always played through the pain, had this fierce
look in his eye, just kept it going, kept it going, and always kept our rhythm,
and made sure things always fell into place,” recalls Fiolek. “So he was a lot like the instrument he
played: steady, and always kept the beat going.”

About Me

Welcome to the online home of Gabe Saglie. Gabe is Senior Editor for Travelzoo and a respected travel contributor for dozens of TV news programs and national shows. Gabe is also a longtime wine and food writer based in Santa Barbara, California, where he lives with his wife, two boys and daughter.